Welcome to the first part of our extra special Elixir Wizards Dojo. A mashup made in partnership with ElixirConf Japan, in today’s episode, we pose questions asked by the Japanese Nerves community to Nerves core team members, Frank Hunleth and Justin Schneck. After introducing our guests, we talk about which companies make use of Nerve and explore its use cases by looking at FarmBot, an open source robotic farming tool. Justin and Frank take turns explaining the differences between soft and hard real-time — a springboard to show how Nerve excels within its ‘middle-ground of complexity’, production-orientated niche. From Halloween pranks to growing Sichuan chili peppers in the office, Justin and Frank share the projects that they’ve built using Nerves and emphasize its wide applicability. We discuss how Nerves has been both officially and unofficially ported to different devices, why people send Frank random pieces of hardware in the mail, and the differences between open-source and making your work publicly available. Justin and Frank commiserate over the challenge of working with Bluetooth and the beauty of the Nerves community in pushing innovation. We chat more about Nerves, including how you can extend the functionality of file systems, before Justin and Frank unpack their roadmap for Nerves’s future. Tune in to learn more about the Nerves Project, a system that can add a great deal of agility to any development cycle.
Key Points From This Episode:
Introducing our guests and this episode’s focus on the Japanese Elixir community.
The double-edge of broadcasting your excitement about Elixir projects.
Looking at FarmBot as a practical use-case to show off what Nerve can do.
Differences between soft and hard real-time using FarmBot as an example.
What Nerves excels at; acting as a gateway for other processors.
Justin and Frank share the projects that they’ve built using Nerves.
A brief digression where Justin shares his love of Chinese Sichuan cooking.
What other markets are making use of Nerves in their product cycle.
The unique ‘middle-ground’ of complexity that Nerves is best suited to address.
Porting Nerves to different devices and what devices need to run Nerves.
Open-source versus making work public and how Justin took some of his Bluetooth work public.
The challenges of working with Bluetooth.
Hear how a group in the community is making a Nerves keyboard.
How you can extend the functionality of a file system on Nerves.
Nerves’s features that make it such an excellent tool within a production environment.
When deploying with Nerves Hub, learn how to configure Wi-Fi modules with different devices.
Starting with a facelift, Frank and Justin share their roadmap for Nerves’s future.
How companies Vary and SmartRent have contributed to the longevity of Nerves.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
SmartLogic — https://smartlogic.io/
ElixirConf — https://elixirconf.com/2020
Frank Hunleth — https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhunleth/
Justin Schneck — https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinschneck
Susumu Yamazaki — https://twitter.com/zacky1972
Nerves Project — https://www.nerves-project.org/
Nerves Project Open Collective — https://opencollective.com/nerves-project
Nerves Project GitHub — https://github.com/nerves-project/nervespack#erlang-distribution
Nerves Kiosk System GitHub — https://github.com/nerves-web-kiosk/kiosksystemrpi3
FarmBot — https://farm.bot/
Rose Point — https://www.rosepoint.com/
The Food of Sichuan — https://www.amazon.com/Food-Sichuan-Fuchsia-Dunlop/dp/1324004835
Lance Halvorsen — https://www.linkedin.com/in/lance-halvorsen-07a102/
Atom VM GitHub — https://github.com/bettio/AtomVM
Lichee Pi Zero — https://licheepizero.us/
Pavlok — https://pavlok.com/
Harald GitHub — https://github.com/verypossible-labs/harald
Bluetooth with Nerves Notes GitHub — https://gist.github.com/fhunleth/fae46998609814ae4a8abd44f6f08188
Fwup GitHub — https://github.com/fhunleth/fwup
‘Building a keyboard with Elixir’ — https://medium.com/swlh/bui